How New York restaurateurs Chintan Pandya and Roni Mazumdar are changing the face of Indian food in the West

Seasonal vegetable seekh, wrapped in wood and grilled over charcoal

Scene 1
Two middle-aged Indian women walk into Masalawala, a restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, and ask for butter chicken and samosa.
"It's not available," the chef responds.
"What kind of an Indian restaurant doesn't serve samosa and butter chicken?" one of them retorts.
"A Bengali restaurant," reasons the chef.
"So what!" they say, visibly irritated, and walk away.

Scene 2
An enthusiastic customer tells the chef, you should try adding wasabi to the dish.
"Pray, why?" asks the chef.
"Because it would elevate the dish," the customer responds.
"I don't think it's elevating, it's alienating it. Would a Japanese chef ever use Indian ingredients? The answer is no," the chef says.

The chef in both these stories is Mumbai boy Chintan Pandya, chef-partner at Dhamaka, who was awarded the 2022 Chef of the Year by the prestigious James Beard Foundation. Unpretentious is the first word that comes to mind when we meet him with restaurateur-partner Roni Mazumdar of Unapologetic Foods, for the Masters of Marriott Bonvoy and Culinary Culture meet and greet at Saffron, JW Marriott Juhu. The pair was in the city to host select dinners at the restaurant to celebrate the dishes that Indians love to eat at home: baigan bharta, mach paturi, chatpata aam, wood-wrapped seekh kabab, murgh pulao, and meetha paan.

Smoked eggplant mashed with green garlic, chilli, bajra and a hint of jaggery; mach paturi. Pics/Shadab Khan

Pandya was cooking on his home turf after 15 years and was visibly thrilled to be in a place that inspires him in the kitchen in New York every single day. "Some of our best food is what's on the streets and in our homes," said Pandya, who was raised in a Gujarati vegetarian family in Juhu and is ironically, a champion of head-to-toe cooking, using goat brains, kidneys, testicles and even the pig's face. And, guests love it. If we had gone with the assumption that everybody [visiting an Indian eatery] only orders butter chicken and samosa, we'd never have showcased the food that truly excites us," he says.

Mazumdar, who grew up in Kolkata in the 1980s, believing that foreign is better than desi is quick to dismiss the idea of the Americanised versions of Mughlai and Punjabi food served in New York. "Indians can't even relate to it. It is cheaper and takeout-friendly, but is more labour-intensive, and uses ingredients like cauliflower, ginger, coriander and mint that are in fact more expensive. As Indians, we have a habit of questioning our own identity. The colonial impact still lingers strongly in our minds and I don't blame America for any of our problems. We have never put our real cuisine out there," he says, adding, "In high school, I'd tell my mom to not make fish curry when friends were coming over. This sense of insecurity keeps playing in our minds. So when Chintan came up with the idea of putting bheja fry on the menu, I wasn't convinced. It was his conviction that made me change my mind. If we'd go by the assumption that everybody only orders butter chicken or samosa, then when would we ever showcase the food that truly excites us?" asks Mazumdar.

(L-R) Chef Chintan Pandya and restaurateur Roni Mazumdar of Dhamaka in New York had arrived in the city last fortnight to host dinners with Marriott's Chef Gaurav Malhotra and celebrate the forgotten dishes of India

Their first restaurant, Adda Indian Canteen, launched in 2018 in Queens, New York, became a national sensation in the US and it gave them the confidence to take it to another level with Dhamaka - going into unexplored food choices of India. "We took an approach where each region got its due. It made the conversations with our guests richer and created a whole different narrative in New York," says Pandya.

Dhamaka isn't swanky. On the contrary, their glasses are from Ikea and the plates are stainless steel. Just like at home. Most of the dishes are cooked and served in the same clay pots, cast iron dishes and pressure cookers they are made in. "We are an expensive Indian restaurant, but not in the manner of being posh or shaving truffle on a dish. We are expensive because of the ingredients we use. It has been a fight against the normal perception and people questioning our intentions, but we are okay with that," says Pandya, who goes on to explain the math, "At a good Italian restaurant, the price of a burrata salad is about $24. About 90 per cent of the restaurants don't even make their burrata and the ones that do, get a yield of 30 per cent from a gallon of milk. For paneer, the yield is 13 to 14 per cent - on a good day. So technically, we should be pricing our paneer dishes higher," adds Pandya, who makes paneer from full-fat milk sourced from local dairies, buying out their whole batch. "When we sell it at a certain price, people complain about it being expensive. I ask them if they liked the quality . They say, it's the best. Then why would you not want to pay for it?" he asks.

The nuanced difference between lamb and mutton is hard to tell, even for some of the most experienced chefs. "Anything that you want to do depends on how far you want to go with your vision. There is no mutton vendor on the east coast of America, so we source from someone in Arizona, a four-and-a-half hour flight away, every two weeks. You have to push yourself to do that, nobody's asking you to do it," says Pandya.

The first rule at Unapologetic Food, the company that runs Semma, Dhamaka, Adda Indian Canteen, Masalawala, Rowdy Rooster, and Kebabwala restaurants, is to not change the food to suit others. "We serve Indian food which is the best version of the dish. Eat it or leave it - we are not here to please you; instead, we would serve a version that the chef feels is the best version of the dish. So, when we're making Champaran meat from Bihar, we don't make a version that is ideal for a restaurant setting, we make it like that man is making on his chula, in a clay pot, by smoking it and using whole garlic," says Mazumdar.

The duo feels that at times, chefs want to mimic what a Noma or Eleven Madison Park has done - even though that cuisine is radically different - because it wins awards. "A lot of it becomes about the personal journey of a chef. The real power of a chef is to know when to hold back," feels Mazumdar.

Adding to it, Gaurav Malhotra, Executive Chef at JW Marriott, Juhu, agrees. He highlights the irony of Indian students at Institute of Hotel Management studying from French food Bible, Larousse Gastronomique, while chefs abroad are learning about Indian culinary culture. "Using the sous vide technique or confit garlic makes them feel that they have elevated a dish. Some Indian techniques are far more complex but haven't received their due. Today, everyone wants to be a pastry chef, no one wants to be a halwai. Also, Indian recipes need better documentation. When my mother shares a recipe that was passed down from my grandmom, it is at 95 per cent accuracy. By the time it comes to me, it would be at 90 per cent... that's deterioration of authenticity over time."

When Mazumdar moved to the US with his family at 13, he witnessed first-hand the inferiority complex most Indians experienced. "Americans are not sitting and judging us; we are, in our own heads," he says. It doesn't surprise us why Pandya and Mazumdar are also the only Indian restaurateurs to hold a seat at the New York State Restaurant Association. That Naomi Watts, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael J Fox and Padma Lakshmi are their regular patrons, proves them right.